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Jews, and I wondered at that omission. According to Abel , C. Day
Lewis, the English poet laureate, paraphrased the Gerard Manley
Hopkins poem, "Why do I, seeing a soldier, feel ashamed?" substi–
tuting "communist" for "soldier"; Abel makes clear that socialism, for
his generation , was meant to have the significance that the war had
had for a prior generation: what became a minority experience,
socialism in America, originally had been intended to be main–
stream.
What makes the book an utter delight, is Abel's jaunty wander–
ings among the surrealists and existentialists. In addition to New
York's voyage to Russia, the other big event of the 1930s was the fer–
ment in the art world. By the early forties, European intellectuals
and artists turned New York into a dazzling place. It's nice, finding
out firsthand what they were up to. At a party for the magazine,
In–
stead,
at Matta's place, in the Palisades, Marcel Duchamp suggested
that the men place a masked man in the children's playhouse and
suggest to each woman, as she arrived at the party, that "just as there
were foods to be eaten and liquors to be drunk , so there was a man
in a mask in the children's house to serve any purpose a woman
might have." Duchamp, then , with abundant bad faith, asked
Matta, whose wife was having an affair with Pierre Matisse, what he
would do if his wife went into the playhouse . "I don't want her to."
"Why not?" asked Duchamp . "Because," Matta said, "I love her and
she loves me. " "1 think you're stupid," said Duchamp.
It
sounds like a
terrific Lionel Abel play; I had always heard about the sexy lives of
the surrealists , but most accounts don't actually capture their slightly
off-the-wall spirit. Abel has a Proustian sense about what we readers
really want to know; what is significant about high and low life.
Thank God, he is a playful ex-leftist! After Matta lost his wife to
Matisse , he made off with Mougouche, Gorky's wife . Sexual free–
dom, then, was neither the prerogative of the bourgeoisie nor the
puritan socialists . For the surrealists, it was part of their statement:
Abel thinks, "The great thing about the Surrealists is that they were
attuned to the distress of their time - a distress which continues into
ours, and to which the American abstract artists, including Gorky,
were not attuned. There is one single exception-Jackson Pollock."
Abel became one of the few New York intellectuals to engage
seriously, not only with the art world, but also with Europeans like
Sartre, the complex Andrea Caffi for whom the bourgeoisie were
"those who can afford to take trips to America to see their mothers,"
and Nicola Chiaromonte. (He mentions Chiaromonte's anger at the
